Fighting with fire

CHAPTER NINETEEN

They spent the rest of that evening in the bar. Slow Sid was clearly something of an enigma to the other cowboys and it seemed to bring them great amusement to take it in turns buying him glasses of milk.

Of course, whilst he was sitting in the bar, Lex could not be looking for the sword, but he didn’t mind. This was groundwork. Groundwork that was going splendidly well. Already Lex could see that Slow Sid was going to serve him much better than Sid the Kid ever could. It was, after all, one of his own rules that he should always be underestimated as much as possible, by as many people as possible. In his preoccupation with learning how to become a cowboy, he had become too good. The other cowboys might have been wary of Sid the Kid, with his mean card skills and his impressive knife spinning and the keen, sharp mind that made up for his lack of brawn.

Sid the Kid could never have wandered the house at night. Slow Sid, on the other hand… Well, no one would think twice about a nincompoop lost in the halls. The trick, therefore, was to get himself known to as many of these cowboys as possible. And that evening spent in the bar was the perfect way to do it. With a little bit of help from Jesse, everyone became very interested in Slow Sid. It was cleverly done, Lex couldn’t deny that. Because Jesse was, at the end of the day, every bit as much of a rotter as Lex was, the cowboy didn’t even need Lex to tell him what to do. He could do it all by himself! Whilst maintaining a perfectly amiable manner towards Lex, Jesse brazenly exploited him for the others’ entertainment.

They bounced off each other beautifully. At one point, Jesse proclaimed that he’d never seen anyone dance like Slow Sid. He then promptly sat down at the honky-tonk piano and started to play a lively, jolly little tune. Lex leapt up on to the bar, secretly delighted by the cowboy’s improvisation, and broke out into the most absurd jig he could manage. The cowboys cheered merrily. It was probably no lie to say that they had never seen anything so silly in their lives.

It was perfect. Even if there were cowboys staying in the house who were not in the bar that night, they would be sure to hear about Slow Sid later and, if they were to catch Lex wandering around at night, then they would surely put two and two together and assume he was just a halfwit who couldn’t find his room, rather than a thief and an adventurer who was looking for the Sword of Life. As Slow Sid, Lex could get away with doing practically anything.

It was about midnight when Lex and Jesse finally left. After the dancing, Lex had affected a sudden fatigue and apparently gone to sleep with his head on the bar. Seeing that he was to provide no more amusement to them, the other cowboys had settled down to talk to Jesse, flicking cigarette butts at Lex from time to time but paying him no attention other than that.

Finally, Jesse collected Lex from the bar and they made their way back out to the main entrance hall. Up the stairs they went, past the portraits and up to the large landing at the top.

The corridor leading there was uncommonly thin. Only just wide enough to accommodate Jesse’s broad shoulders. Anyone with a plump stature would not possibly have been able to squeeze through. It was lit with electric lights along the ceiling. Doors led off from both sides.

Jesse glanced over his shoulder at Lex and said quietly, ‘Not a bad start, eh?’

The corridor appeared to be deserted but Lex did not respond to Jesse’s question. Breaking character was a risky business and a bad habit. Lex never allowed himself to do it until he could be absolutely sure the coast was clear. So he ignored Jesse and simply continued walking down the corridor in the slow, shuffling gait he had adopted as Slow Sid. Jesse looked faintly surprised but had the sense to say nothing as they continued on down the hallway. A moment later he stopped in front of a room with the number nine painted roughly on it in chalk. He unlocked the door and they stepped in.

Because the corridor had been so narrow, Lex had been expecting the room to be small, too. But, actually, it was extremely large. The corridor had obviously just been another one of Nathaniel East’s quirks, rather than a result of a genuine need to conserve space.

The large room they stepped into was fairly ordinary in so much as it had a large four poster bed, a wardrobe, a sink and a window that looked out from the front of the building. A hammock was strung across one corner. But the odd thing about the room was its colour scheme, for everything in it was a garish shade of lime green. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, the furniture. It was extremely wearing on the senses and Lex instinctively wanted to wince and shield his eyes from the horrible sight. But he kept staunchly in character as Slow Sid whilst Jesse groaned aloud and said, ‘Aw, man, not the snot room!’

Lex couldn’t help thinking that, if someone had snot that colour, then that person must have something very seriously wrong with them indeed. But he said nothing as Jesse closed the door behind them. Instead, he rambled over to the wardrobe and opened the door to check inside it. Then he wandered over to the bed and looked underneath it.

‘What are you doin’?’ Jesse asked, staring at him. ‘Lex?’

Lex ignored him and went to look behind both of the heavy lime drapes that fell all the way to the floor alongside the window. Only once he’d satisfied himself that there was no one else in the room with them did he relax and drop the act.

‘This is the ugliest room I ever saw in my life!’ he declared.

Jesse breathed a sigh of relief then and said, ‘You gave me a horrible turn for a minute there, kid. I was almost thinkin’ that perhaps you really did hit your head in that scuffle outside and the entire evening weren’t an act, after all!’

‘I never break character in public,’ Lex replied. ‘Never. So don’t ever talk to me out there unless you’re talking to Slow Sid. And thanks a lot for landing me with that character, by the way! Having to play your pet monkey all week was not what I had in mind!’

Of course, Lex was secretly rather pleased with the Slow Sid development, but there was no point in admitting as much to Jesse.

The cowboy merely shrugged and said, ‘You’d have found yourself fighting a duel with scar face outside if I hadn’t stepped in when I did.’

‘Rubbish!’ Lex retorted. ‘I can look after myself. If you’d just given me another moment, I would have got myself out of it all right. Next time you decide to help me, don’t!’

‘Noted,’ Jesse replied. ‘Let me know how that works out for you. And, since you’re so keen on staying in character, I guess I’ll just have to take the bed whilst you take the hammock.’

‘Help yourself to the bed, by all means,’ Lex replied. ‘It’s probably riddled with lice. What do you people sleep in, anyway? And don’t tell me you sleep in the nude.’

Jesse shrugged. ‘Shirt and long johns, usually.’

‘Good,’ Lex said, pulling off his jacket. ‘I’m going to go and do a bit of sleepwalking.’

‘Knock yourself out,’ Jesse replied. ‘You won’t find the sword.’

‘That’s another thing,’ Lex said. ‘You never told me you’d been here looking for the sword yourself.’

Jesse shrugged. ‘You never asked, kid.’

‘Huh. Well, sit back and watch me succeed where you failed. It should be an enlightening experience for you.’

Lex stripped down to his shirt and long johns. Barefoot and with his hair messed up a bit, he could instantly pull the sleepwalking card if need be. Or else he could simply say he was looking for the bathroom. Thus attired, Lex left Jesse snoring in the bedroom (the big dolt was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow) and set off to explore Dry Gulch House.

An hour later, Lex had still not seen everything there was to see. The house was enormous. More of a castle than a house, really. And the problem was that it had no logical structure. It was like a maze. Certain parts of the house were therefore easy to miss. Even parts that you had seen would not be easy to get back to once you’d left them behind.

It was clear that the most used parts of the house were the bar downstairs and the bedrooms. Other than that, it seemed like most of the cowboys didn’t wander into the other areas. After all, people had been searching for the Sword of Life for over a hundred years, now, and had never found it. Most people thought that it couldn’t be found at all or that it was a myth and had never existed to begin with. It was easy to see how a person could get lost for hours? maybe even days? inside the house. It was almost as if it had been built to confuse and disorient. Some rooms were completely dust free, whilst others were coated in a layer of the stuff several inches thick.

The thing that jumped out about the house straightaway? other than how utterly bizarre it was? was the fox motif that was everywhere. Practically every single room had at least one fox in it somewhere. Sometimes it was easy to spot? a large wooden statue in the centre of the room, for example. Other times, you had to look more closely. The fox might be a tiny model glued to the skirting board, or it might be carved into a leg of a table, or appear just once somewhere on the wallpaper. Sometimes there was just a fox’s head, in others there was a complete fox. And he was always wearing a waistcoat. Lex thought back to the painting in the entrance hall of Nathaniel having tea with a giant fox and supposed it must be the same one.

A second thing jumped out at him and that was the prevalence of the number thirteen within the house. Chandeliers had thirteen arms; wallpaper flowers had thirteen petals; tables were set with thirteen chairs; and unused fireplaces were stacked with thirteen logs. The number thirteen bothered Lex more than the fox did. Everyone knew that thirteen was a magical number. Everyone knew that Nathaniel had been friends with a witch who had cast a sticking spell over the contents of the house for him. Lex knew as well as anyone that magic could be tricky, and that it could be dangerous, and so the thirteens everywhere made him proceed even more cautiously than before.

At one point, he passed through a huge library with shelves upon shelves of books. There was even a ladder to reach the ones all the way up at the top. These books couldn’t possibly compare to the thrill of the library tree, of course, but Lex was quite excited by the sheer number, just the same? until he realised that they were all identical. The library housed one volume and one volume only? The Life And Times Of Nathaniel East, by Nathaniel East.

Lex pulled a face in disgust. All this shelf space, wasted on just one book. He reminded himself that Nathaniel East was Jeremiah’s great-great uncle. It therefore should have come as no surprise that the man’s house was full of portraits of, and books about, himself. Vanity clearly ran in the family.

Lex pulled one of the books off the nearest shelf and flicked through it. It was a slim volume that seemed to be a rambling account of the dreamworld Nathaniel had clearly lived in. Lex recognised two of the chapter headings from the paintings in the entrance hall. In those chapters, Nathaniel told of how he had, several times, taken tea with a giant fox named Plantagenet. Apparently, they would sit and chat for hours over the cucumber sandwiches and sugar tongs. It seemed that the fox had many fascinating stories to tell and those afternoons were, Nathaniel wrote, some of the most pleasant he’d ever spent. In the other chapter, he blithely told of how he had once defeated a great white dragon wielding nothing more than a smoked trout.

‘Smoked trout!’ Lex muttered derisively. ‘It ought to have been a swordfish, at the very least!’

He took the book with him. There really wasn’t much point in trying to pinch it when the sticking spell over the house would not allow anything to be removed from its walls, but he could at least take it back to his bedroom and have a flick through it later.

He continued on through the house. He was attempting to draw a rough map as he went but? as other architects had found before him? it was almost impossible to capture Dry Gulch House on paper. The rooms ranged from the almost ordinary, to the astonishingly impractical, to the outrageously bizarre. Lex walked through one room with a lofty ceiling from which hung thirty or so open umbrellas. Glass bubbles were set into the wall and twenty or so bath-tubs, overflowing with rubber ducks, stood below.

In another room, Lex found a sort of chapel with three stained-glass windows, on which were written obscure poems. The first read:

I, Nathaniel East, here doth claim,

That all who try to slur my mortal name,

Will fail and fail, again, again,

For I have not hidden it in vain.

The second read:

Time will tell, as time does well,

What will change, what stays the same,

Who will triumph, who will fall,

For I have seen it all before.

And, finally, the third:

Plantagenet shall guard the sword in a fond embrace,

Until the cowboy king shall take it from its rightful place.

For noble cause in a heroic race.

Much danger, peril, death, all else do risk,

If they wouldst try and take it with the kitchen whisk.

Lex had heard of the windows before. Most people thought they were a riddle, telling where the sword was hidden. Lex accepted it looked that way but, after all, Nathaniel East had only hidden the sword once he realised his house was being ambushed by a gang of outlaws. If these windows had been put in when the house was originally being built, then he couldn’t possibly have known that was going to happen. Some sources suggested that Nathaniel East had believed he could see the future. But, just because the nut believed it, it didn’t mean it was true.

Even so, there was no denying that the poems on the window certainly seemed to point towards the hiding place of the sword. Lex wrote the verses down in his notebook next to the map he was sketching. There had been various different interpretations of the riddle. The obvious one for the ‘cowboy king’ was a cowboy who was tougher, meaner and stronger than all the rest, which didn’t hold well for Lex if Nathaniel’s prediction was true since he was, in fact, a completely fake cowboy. Underneath the act, he was no more a real cowboy than he was a duck-billed platypus.

But he noted the riddle down, anyway. He already knew who Plantagenet was, for the book had stated that this was the name of the giant fox. Unfortunately, knowing this did not help Lex much, for the simple fact that the fox motif was literally everywhere in the house. Finding the right fox did not narrow down potential hiding places by much, if at all.

Lex opened the book again, hoping for more information that might furnish some further clue. He skimmed through the relevant section and learnt that Nathaniel had believed this Plantagenet to be what he called a ‘dream-fox’. Lex rolled his eyes, for doubtless this meant that Nathaniel had only ever seen Plantagenet when he’d been asleep, and yet the mad old fool hadn’t had the sense to realise that this meant the giant fox wasn’t real at all, but merely a product of his own loopy mind. In addition, Nathaniel noted how Plantagenet always came to see him at the same time: thirteen o’clock. Lex narrowed his eyes at this. Thirteen o’clock? the witching hour. If there ever were such a thing as a dream-fox, then thirteen o’clock would be the time it would come. It certainly explained why the number thirteen appeared so often within the house. Could it actually be that a giant fox really had -

Lex shook his head, impatient with himself. If he didn’t watch out, he’d end up as nutty as Nathaniel. He’d never heard of a dream-fox before? never in all the books he’d read. And Lex was very well read.

He went on, past staircases that led up into ceilings and windows set into the floor. At one point, the entire floor was made out of glass. It looked directly down on to the umbrella room. Lex could tell because he could see the umbrellas? all of different colours? opened out beneath his feet.

He spent a few minutes in the entrance hall examining the paintings there. He noted that the one with Nathaniel having tea with a giant fox was entitled, Taking Tea With Plantagenet. Not only that, but the fox appeared in several other paintings, too, usually in the background and sometimes partially obscured. One painting of Nathaniel showed him serenely strolling, stick in hand, through a battlefield. An ancient battlefield from the looks of things because the warriors all seemed to be half naked, and wielding bows and arrows. Indeed, even Nathaniel’s top hat had an arrow sticking through it. And there, at the bottom right-hand corner of the painting, was a fox’s tail, only just visible.

In another painting, Nathaniel stood, balancing on one leg, in a river, surrounded by pink flamingos. He had his umbrella up, despite the fact that it wasn’t raining. And on the nearby bank, peering through a bush, was what looked suspiciously like a giant fox in a waistcoat.

Lex spotted the fox in a few more paintings but it was always partially hidden or obscure. The teatime one was the only one that showed him clearly. Clear enough to see that he couldn’t possibly be real.

Lex moved on to the fourth floor. At one point, he opened a door and almost went through it before realising? just in time? that there was no floor beyond? just a sheer drop to the courtyard below. Later on, he came across a sort of games room that might have been fun were it not for the fact that all the balls on the snooker table, and all the chessmen on the chess table, were nailed firmly in place.

He did not come across another person during his explorations. The cowboys staying in the house were all either asleep or still down in the bar. But, in actual fact, Lex could have easily got away with wandering about the house, even as Sid the Kid, for it was just so easy to get lost, which was probably why the other cowboys stuck to the bar and the bedrooms rather than attempting to navigate the rest of this madhouse.

As Lex went on, he began to feel a little disheartened, for the house was just so big. It had taken years to build and it would take years to search. Jesse had been here on four separate occasions looking for the sword and had no luck. Hundreds had attempted the task before him but with no success. Lex had only four days before the third round began. Four days to do what everyone before him had failed to do.

He had an excellent sense of direction but, when he started trying to make his way back to his bedroom, he found it extremely difficult, even with the map he’d drawn. The problem was that most of the rooms had doors leading to several other rooms. It was not simply a case of one room following on from another in a logical order.

At one point, he came across a room that was full of doors. There was a grand total of twenty, set around the walls. Lex opened every single one of them, sure that many must lead to the same room. One door led nowhere: when Lex opened it, there was just a brick wall behind it. And another led to a room so small there was no way any human would ever be able to get into it. But the other eighteen doors all led to different rooms. How was that even possible? Surely there should not be enough space for them all. Granted, they were all narrow rooms but even so…

Lex felt a mounting sense of frustration. The house was too big and there was no logic to it. He could be the cleverest person in the world and still be unable to crack the riddle on the stained-glass windows. Trying to unravel the messed-up mind of a madman was like trying to untangle a never-ending ball of string.

Still, there was nothing for it but to forge on. Lex spent most of that night exploring the house. In fact, due to the fact that he got hopelessly lost, he was later back to his room than he’d intended, and only fell into his hammock a bare hour before the sun began to rise.